heartbeats

[Yves Glodt]

Hi,

I need to write a heartbeat solution to monitor some external clients, 
and what is different as in the examples that I have seen so far is that 
I want my central server to poll the clients, and not the clients 
"pinging" the central server.

In detail I need a daemon on my central server which e.g. which in a 
loop pings (not really ping but you know what I mean) each 20 seconds 
one of the clients.

The only thing the client has to do is to accept the connection. 
(optionally sending back some bytes). If it refuses it is assumed to be 
offline.

My central server, and this is important, should have a short timeout. 
If one client does not respond because it's offline, after max. 10 
seconds the central server should continue with the next client.


Which python functions would be the most convenient for this application?

Best regards,
Yves